Aguilar retires from CBP

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

David Aguilar is retiring at the end of March as head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The Department of Homeland Security was a bit sloppy in the title it used for Aguilar in a press release describing his career achievements and thanking him for his service. The statement referred to Aguilar as commissioner of CBP. In reality, he ran the agency. But he was never commissioner. A career civil servant, he became acting commissioner when the political appointee he worked under, Alan Bersin, left office at the end of 2011. And in recent months, CBP officials have gone back to referring to Aguilar as deputy commissioner, the position he was appointed to, because the statute of limitations on having an acting commissioner had expir...